Bonkers Blog January 2017

Surely you cannot have forgotten how Bexley Council
ignored thousands of
objections to selling one of their larger recreation and wild life spaces?
An outline planning application has been prepared by Bexley Council pre-sale and there is to be an exhibitionin Sidcup Manor House on 9th February.

BiB is not a blog about police corruption, if it wasn’t for Bexley Council
pressurising the local police force into offering protection from the
consequences of their various wrong doings I doubt the police would ever get a
mention here. But unfortunately the police and Council act as one when either of
them is caught out. Usually it is Bexley Council which is caught out.

My default position on the police is that every single one of them is corrupt
which probably sounds over the top but as Jeff Boothe, the recently departed
Borough Commander, said at his last appearance in the Council Chamber, his
is a disciplined service and he goes where he is told to and he follows every
instruction he is given.

Former Bexley police Inspector Mick Barnbrook has related quite enough anecdotes
of how an honest police officer has no alternative but to obey the instructions
of a bent senior officer if he wishes to avoid transfer to some far flung
outpost of the Met. Police, has aspirations of promotion or even of retaining his job.

In 2011 Bexley Council asked the police to have me arrested for “criticising
Councillors on a personal level” and Bexley police immediately jumped at their
command. Police documents released subsequently suggest that the request was made by Tyrant O’Neill.

Only last week the Met’s Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS) wrote to tell me they were
following up yet another new lead, though a bit of me suspects that a succession
of new leads is a delaying tactic. They really don’t want to find two senior
officers guilty of perverting the course of justice.

In the Bacon/Tuckley case
two police constables stand accused of making false statements at the request of Bexley Council a year after the event.
Statements which contradicted what was said originally. Although there were eight signed
witness statements relating to that event the DPS decided not to look at them
and assumed instead that the belated police reports were all the evidence required.

The IPCC disagreed and ordered a proper investigation. Almost incredibly the
current DPS position is to refuse the instruction. There is still no advice from
the Crown Prosecution Service on whether or not Councillor Cheryl Bacon and Will
Tuckley will be charged, although it is fairly obvious they won’t be. But the
CPS is apparently still unable to confirm it and we must rely on leaked information.

Professional advice was that what I wrote got nowhere near to being harassment
but the police left me in limbo for seven months while they
came to the same conclusion.

I asked Bexley police five weeks ago
if sending officers to my door was the result of incompetence or political pressure. Councillor Massey was allowed
access to Sidcup police station which is no longer open to the public, not at the time he attended anyway.

Bexley police has no answer to my question so Commissioner Bernard-Howe now has
another formal allegation of Gross Misconduct on his desk.

I feel sorry for the police officers who were put under pressure by Councillor
Massey but they have to be made to understand that if they do Bexley Council
favours which stray outside the letter of the law and impinge unfairly on residents there will always be consequences.

Note: It is exactly 1,700 days since a complaint went to Sir Bernard
Hogan-Howe about the failure of Bexley police to properly investigate the Craske case. No answers yet.

This is the time of the year when Bexley Council slips in its revised list of
fees and charges, usually well above inflation and as often as not all the most
regular charges up by more than they claim.

Last year it was admitted that charges would rise by 10% but this year I have
not so far been able to find a claimed average figure. A perusal of the proposed
tariffs suggest that 10% is again the norm but with wide variations. Some have
risen by close to 30% while one has actually gone down.

There was of course a public consultation on charging policy. Did you notice it?
It was hidden in the current issue of the Bexley Magazine under the heading
"Challenges and opportunities".

I
missed it on a first read through (it is on page eight) and I was not alone.
Only 74 people responded from which no clear conclusion could be drawn but there
was a tendency to disapprove of exclusively on-line services and sympathy for
spending on those in need of social care. You will therefore not be surprised to
know that social care fees suffer the largest price increases of all. Home Care
visits up 10% and the Brokerage Fee - whatever that may be - up 28%.

Library charges are all up at around the 10% mark and sports activity charges
increase by anything from around 10% to 25% - mostly the former but a few as
little as 2%. After imposing massively increased charges for funeral services in
recent years, there are no increases in 2017/18.

A permit for wedding photography in parks rises from £33 to £40 and skip
licenses go up by 25% to £45.

Annual parking ֹ‘season tickets’ are extortionate and this year the discount for those who come
into the borough to work has been removed.

The Bin Tax is unchanged although the introductory rate has of course gone. It
represents a large increase in Council Tax but remains one of the lowest bin tax
rates to be found anywhere.

My sister pays £68 a year for hers and was charged £29 for the bin. Her Council
Tax Rate (same Band and both Tory controlled) is very slightly more expensive
than mine. On the other hand, her nearest town car parks are free.

I used to be optimistic that exposing Bexley Council’s worst excesses and the lies
required to conceal them might eventually lead to it cleaning up its
act. I am inclined to think it has to some extent, or maybe they have become
more expert at covering their tracks.
The new Chief Executive has certainly gone
out of her way to stop staff and Councillors making contact, but despite
the
literal barriers erected, conversations have not been choked off entirely.

They privatised the Link Line to a company which presumably will not staff their
emergency switchboard with just one trainee and hope for the best.
In Bexley a
lady died alone because of Bexley’s incomprehensible staffing decision.

Cabinet Member Philip Read claims to have transformed Children’s Services since
he took over from Katie Perrior, now working in Downing Street.

I have no inside knowledge of Children’s Services except that I too often hear of
kiddy snatching but the initiatives and figures coming out of Philip Read’s
department suggest that is unlikely to again neglect children to the point of
death and the Deputy Director who made so many poor decisions no longer works in Bexley.

Long term readers may recall three year old
Rhys Lawrie who suffered 38 serious injuries to his tiny body
which were said to have been caused by a fall from a sofa.

His mother moved to Erith in October 2007 following a career in the Army which
had sectioned her because of mental instabilities. In Erith she reported herself
to medical staff because of urges to harm her baby. The medics made a report to
Bexley Council which ignored it.

From 2007 to 2010 Rhys was in and out of hospital constantly with injuries that
were blamed on epilepsy. His mother banned his grandparents from seeing him. When
he attended pre-school covered in bruises the teachers reported the situation to
Bexley Council and again it took no action.

By January 2011 Rhys was dead and a mentally challenged 16 year old was convicted
of his manslaughter.

Rhys’s grandfather unearthed a great deal of evidence that suggested it was a
wrongful conviction. By studying end of school times and bus times he concluded
that the 16 year old boy could not have been present when Rhys died. He was
convinced the mother was implicated.

The first ambulance men on the scene confirmed that the boy was not there but
the mother was. Inexplicably they were not called as witnesses for the defence.

The case bore remarkable similarities to Haringey’s Baby P. case which was
still in the news at the time.

The theory was that Bexley Council was so concerned that their failure to
protect Rhys or help his mother had been a major factor in the death that
they prevailed upon the police to find another killer. A mentally retarded 16 year old who was a regular visitor to the house was a Godsend.

However despite the pathologist’s report the police initially decided the death
was an accident and failed to secure what should have been declared a crime scene. Rhys’s mother spent
the night of his death, not grieving or being comforted by friends but scrubbing
the house clean of all forensic evidence.

Whether
Bexley Council really did a deal with the police is uncertain but they made sure
that the author of the Serious Case Review was a former Bexley Director, so not
exactly impartial, and
Philip Read refused
to answer a question about the
case. The lack of transparency raises suspicions.

Rhys’s grandfather continues to
study the evidence relating to what he believes was a miscarriage of
justice and recently discovered something new.

A [named] Detective Inspector made a secret pact with Rhys’s mother that if she
kept quiet about her being able to wipe a Crime Scene clean she in return would
be offered immunity from prosecution.

The pact was approved by a [named] Detective Superintendent after
which no one was prepared to rescind it.

Despite Rhys’s mother being innocent of his killing under the law Bexley Council
took another of her children into care and to this day she is only allowed
infrequent supervised visits. The grandfather is convinced that Bexley Council knows who killed Rhys
but admitting it at the time would have landed them in far too much trouble.

I sometimes think that Crossrail’s number one mission is to frustrate those
of us who are trying to make
a photographic record of what is the
most exciting thing to hit Abbey Wood since Thamesmead was built in the sixties.

Two weeks ago Network Rail erected fencing on the flyover which goes
far beyond that needed to protect their works. It extends towards Knee Hill and past the northbound
temporary bus stop for no obvious reason. The flyover’s balustrade is not
especially high but no one has fallen over it or been intent on
self-destruction in the 30 years I have lived nearby.

There is no extra fencing on the opposite side of the bridge (Photo 3 below) nor is it continuous
on the west side, there is a gap where the flyover crosses Gayton Road.

I can imagine that Crossrail may feel that they have compelled all pedestrians
to use the flyover when few did so before their arrival and therefore must bear the
responsibility for the safety issues that Bexley Council has been happy to abdicate, but they
fall between two or more stools - and they are potentially dangerous.

An old friend of Bexley-is-Bonkers and not all that long ago one of
its most important contributors ended up in an ambulance a week ago after tripping over one
of Crossrail’s fence supports.

This is his abbreviated story

While approaching the temporary bus stop on Harrow Manor Way flyover, I tripped over the concrete footings which are propping up a
temporary fence. I was severely injured and rendered unconscious.

The footing should never have been there in the first place.

The fencing should have been fitted on the outer edge of its concrete base,
not the inner, and then braced to the bridge railings.

What is the fence for? The flyover has always had its rail and no one has disappeared over it.

When I came round
I was helped into a van (thanks to a Good Samaritan called Richard) who stemmed the
blood gushing from my forehead and sat me down until the ambulance arrived. He went to meet it and promptly
tripped over the same fence footing. Fortunately he was able to save himself using both hands. I, as you know,
have only one arm.

I am not against change but Abbey Wood station is built only for the fittest. The overbridge between platforms
is high enough for one train to piggyback on another.

Three modified shower cubicles masquerade as lifts which require a trained operative.

The unfit, the elderly and the disabled have the daunting prospect of labouring to the top with
no centre rail to grab and the way down is ever scarier. The descent is steep and 2" angle Iron
edges the stairs. It would do a lot of damage to anyone who lost their footing and tumbled down (†).
Angle Iron is made for structural works not to protect stairs from chipping or breaking.

They should have taken lessons from the Victorian era and their reassuringly safe stairs.

Abbey Wood station is a no go zone for all but the fittest among us and the new flyover fence
serves no useful purpose and is a hazard to children who cannot resist a hop skip and jump
over the footings. My grandson does it and while passing on a bus I saw a parent try to restrain their own offspring.

I won’t be having another accident at Abbey Wood because it is safer use Woolwich Arsenal and a 180 bus.
Abbey Wood has become far too dangerous.

Photo 1: Fence supports intrude into the footpath area. Result: Elderly one armed man has a ride in an ambulance.

I feel obliged to write a small defence of Crossrail. They are far more safety
conscious than Bexley Council which was content to leave the flyover unlit for
months and the flyover’s only remaining staircase unlit for 30 years. It was
Crossrail’s contractors who put that right and lit Gayton Road after it was left
in the dark for months.

The
station footbridge is high because it has to clear the 32,000 volt overhead
power cables. In only nine months time the footbridge will be equipped with escalators.
There is no centre hand rail on the stairs because the Health & Safety experts
ruled against it.

Additionally one should never underestimate the stupidity of some local youths.
One of my Crossrail contacts says that when suitably inebriated they are not
averse to hopping over the railings to the footpath beneath to save a few seconds walk.

However the writer’s suggestion that the fence should have been placed in the
outer of the three holes in the base supports would appear to be a valid one
which would have prevented the accident that befell him while going for a bus.

They are easily tripped over as I have discovered for myself many times while taking too
close an interest in the Wilton Road works which employ similar bases for the barriers.
The remaining footpath is very narrow and I keep looking for one of Greenwich council’s HILLS apprentices. I have never
before seen so many 40 year old beginners.

The recent Cabinet meeting reports were of the Budget Review; another big part of
the meeting is the Capital Review. Once again, Finance Director Alison Griffin opened the batting order.

She said there was a need to generate alternative revenue streams and to avoid
or slow down costs, £83 million is to be invested in the borough in the coming
year, very nearly half of it going on Temporary Accommodation.
Alison Griffin described it as “an exciting programme”.

Lord
Massey of Rochester said the Investment Programme would be subject to revolving
reviews as they extend over several years. He “commended” the planned investment.

Cabinet Member Linda Bailey “welcomed the programme”. She specially welcomed
Councillor Craske’s announcement “and I thank him very much. It is quite
pleasant to read a report which is giving out stuff. We have got ourselves into
a position where we can spend a bit of money now and it is quite right and
proper that it is spent on Public Realm. It is good to see something positive”. (For a change?)

Councillor Craske came back with “two points”. The Capital Programme will fund
the new town centre cleaning vehicle and the “brand new Belvedere Beach”.

The Cabinet
Member for Yellow Money Boxes Alex Sawyer referred to the regeneration
around Abbey Wood Station to ready it for Crossrail and in Albion Road. “Not
without their problems” he said. However improvements would be made “borough wide”.

The LED street lighting programme is being accelerated and will result in a
reduced electricity bill and safer streets. The programme demonstrates how the
Council is “on the side of hard working residents and better days lie ahead”.

No other Cabinet Member or Councillor wished to speak so the vote on the Capital
Programme was taken. Unanimous approval of course.

I looked at the Agenda for last night’s General Purposes Committee meeting on line and it gave only one incentive
to attend, it looked as though it should be all over and done with inside half an hour. And I was right, 22 minutes
including the Chairman’s welcome to the two members of the public present.

Councillor Cafer Munir always makes visitors feel welcome and chairs most
meetings in a friendly and relaxed manner, I just wish he wasn’t so keen on
being Teresa O’Neill’s lickspittle at Council meetings.There
were only four items up for discussion and only one not of a
‘technical’ nature. That was the stopping up - this is closure to you and me -
of Lensbury Way in Abbey Wood.
It is required as part of Peabody’s redevelopment plans for the area which are
already agreed by the Planning Committee. It was not known if Peabody had
consulted affected residents but Bexley Council planned to put a Legal Notice in the News Shopper.

The ward Councillor Danny Hackett pointed out that that was not a lot of use
because the News shopper does not circulate in that area but a solution was
readily obvious. The law has not yet caught up with the demise of local newspapers
but the Council is obliged only to put a notice in its pages to fulfill its obligations.

Peabody will be paying for the costs associated with the Stopping up Order.
Obviously they are hoping no one will object to their plans, Bexley Council wil
charge them extra for any excessive numbers of complaints.

The Committee appeared to be unsure of how long Lensbury Way would be closed for but the
Agenda says that the existing route will never reopen. A new Lensbury Way will
be constructed to give access to Harrow Manorway a little further to the north
than the old one.

The closure was approved unanimously.

A statutory requirement is that Councils must calculate a Council Tax base.
Essentially, how many dwellings are there in each Tax Band so that it will have some
idea of how much money Council Tax will raise. For the record there are 4,480,
10,531, 29,297, 27,299, 19,340, 4,862, 1686, and 48 houses in Bands A to H
respectively. 9,578 are eligible for discounts of various sorts.

The figures for Business Rates were not available.

Finally the Committee was asked to approve pay and pension policy.

Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour, Belvedere) sought assurance that the pension manipulation perpetrated by
a
former Chief Executive who retired on health grounds could not be repeated.
He received a reported £300,00 pay off and £50,000 a year pension and promptly
got himself a similar job at another Council. Normally that would affect the
pension that Bexley Council still pays out each year but in his case it didn’t
because he managed to persuade the other Council that he should be remunerated
as a self employed person.

There is still no way of preventing such manouvres apart from having a Council
unprepared to work fiddles for their friends.

Recycling
I have been monitoring a long running correspondence between a resident and
Bexley Council which asks why the refuse collector wheels his large bin along
the street tossing all the recyclables carefully separated by residents into
that one bin and in due course into his truck. Not just on one occasion, but every week.

Welling CornerReports are coming in of four way temporary traffic lights at Welling Corner.

This will likely be TfL moving their traffic light control box to where it
should have been put when they messed around with that junction a couple of years ago.

The clowns put it right up against the memorial cannon. So well done
to Bexley Council on getting them to move it. Bringing another part of town to a
standstill will barely be noticed among
all the other traffic disruptions going on.

Photo: The old gas pipe in Abbey Road which has caused
widespread traffic chaos throughout most of January.

It seems to be an unnecessarily complicated method to me and what happens at
stations like Abbey Wood where
the driver’s cab comes to a halt under two feet of concrete? But there may be
something in the story because I once read that tube trains have to lock in very
precisely to the prescribed stopping point before their doors can be opened.

On the other hand it doesn’t explain why the delay appears to be a recent
phenomenon. A two second delay must be the least of train travellers’ problems
over the past 36 hours.

Photo: Why there were no trains via Greenwich from Abbey
Wood yesterday when the derailment is at Lewisham is something of a mystery.

Blue Badge abuse
Bexley Council continues to pursue Blue Badge abusers and a good job too.
Two were heavily fined recently.
It’s not just criminally inclined drivers who are involved in such activities. I knew of someone
with a Blue Badge who is a member of a rambling club and went on long hikes most
weeks. You need someone bent on the inside to be able to pull that trick. It
doesn’t happen any more. Well not in that case. Don’t know about others.

Police issues
The Directorate of Professional Standards have issued another of their monthly progress reports
on their investigation into why the local police failed to charge Councillor
Craske when they first traced an obscene blog to his home telephone line way
back in 2011. Apparently a couple of things they need are hidden away in the
archives and they have decided they must get hold of them. They also need advice from their High
Tech Crime Unit. What? Basic facts are still proving elusive after all this
time? What about the Bexley police sergeant’s own admission that the case was
“crippled by political interference” and the incriminating stuff already
known to exist in the case file?

The
Cabinet Member chosen to follow Peter Craske was Brad Smith (Adults’ Services) but his four minute report on Adult
Services was overshadowed by the aftermath of
the showman’s revelations and the distribution of
his document that proclaimed the details. He said that
the Council was delivering “good quality care within the resources available”
and “bugetary pressures were being met in innovative ways”. Councillor Smith is
responsible for spending £53·9 million this year, the biggest departmental budget, but
might benefit from a few lessons in sales technique from Peter Craske. No one asked him any questions.

Cabinet Member Philip Read may not be quite up to Craske levels of theatricality
but like him he is well versed in the art of political catcalls.

He “reflected on the journey we have been on, a journey that has seen a huge reduction in
financial support but we have demonstrably risen to that challenge. We have resisted the
soft option of putting up compulsory taxes”. Well chosen words. My Council Tax is up by about
4% because of the voluntary Bin Tax alone and so far I have avoided paying the Yellow Money Box Tax.

He must have forgotten about the compulsory taxes imposed on the poorest families (they now pay Council Tax where
previously they did not) but he had not forgotten the need to make fun of the opposition. This
time he had Councillor Danny Hackett (Labour, Lesnes Abbey) in his sights and suggested he might be
already Tweeting his support for Cabinet Member Craske. Tory colleagues dutifully laughed.

“The
reception on the doorstep within our own wards, those who pay Council Tax
appreciate and support our decision not to increase it over the period of the
last Council and are fully behind our decision to hold it at a minimum level in
the years up to 2018.” I think he meant maximum level without the authority of a referendum.

“It would be nice to think that members of the opposition within the Scrutiny
process would come forward with some constructive and positive contributions
instead of their normal and consistent demands to either make no particular
saving or to increase expenditure. We shall see.”

“Children’s Services continues to improve the quality of our service at a time of
reducing resources and increasing demand and cost inflation”. The aim to
increase the proportion of permanent staff is succeeding which has brought down costs.

Five minutes, only two attacks on the opposition. Not bad by Philip Read’s standards.

Cabinet Member for Education, Rob Leitch, is not one to wander into unnecessary
baiting of the opposition. He quickly placed on the record that he was a strong
supporter of Public Realm investment “impressions form reputations and I know
local residents will be delighted [by Peter Craske’s announcement]” and welcomed
the support for Friends’ Groups and the promised deep cleaning of high streets.

On education he said that “funding per head was at an historically low level”
and “the funding formula is unhelpful”.

Councillor Peter Reader (Conservative, Northumberland Heath) spoke in favour of
the strategy of keeping Council Tax levels low into the future.

Councillor Melvin Seymour (Conservative, Northumberland Heath) applauded
“the balanced budget” which provides a platform for making the borough a
better place to live. Councillor Sybil Camsey (Conservative, Brampton) said she was
very pleased with what is happening within Children’s Services. Keeping SEN pupils in
mainstream schools doesn’t just save money it is beneficial to those children.

No one else was interested in speaking so the Cabinet voted through the budget proposals unanimously.

There
was a massive turnout at last night’s Cabinet meeting. Very nearly a full house
of Councillors and the usual four members of the public squeezed into the
Council Chamber, Tories sitting cheek by jowl with Labour members, all to hear
the new slimline Teresa O’Neill stage manage the budget proposals.

And stage managed it was, the script was a corker but the
underlying story was closer to scam.

It began with Alison Griffin delivering her formal address.

The future is uncertain she said and public finances are under pressure however
the Council has shown that it can cope. 95% of the savings programme for this
year has already been delivered.

The Council signed up for the four year deal with Government and the settlement
was largely as anticipated, however there has been a reduction in the New Homes
Bonus and some rearrangements to the Social Care precept (the extra 2% on Council Tax). Houses
built only after a successful planning appeal will not attract the New Homes
Bonus. Do I detect a Government trying to influence planning decisions again?

Overall the Government support grant has been reduced by 30% this year.
Extensive adjustments to an Excel spreadsheet led Ms. Griffin to her proposal that Bexley’s
Council Tax rate should increase by the maximum allowable amount of 1·99% plus 2%
Social Care precept for the second consecutive year. There will be no call on reserves.Lord
Massey of Rochester, the Cabinet Member for Finance Don Massey said that local
authorities generally - and he referred to Surrey County Council which has
proposed a 15% tax increase - “are in a precarious place” but “Bexley remains in
reasonable shape”. In a reference to the London Living Wage he said “well
meaning but ultimately rash decisions in finance terms” should be avoided.

Bexley continues to be given “a relatively low amount from Government compared
to other boroughs and we continue to lobby for a fairer allocation but in
contrast to other authorities we will not need a massive increase in tax to
balance our books next year. Keeping tax as low as possible is the right and
proper thing to do”.

However you can be absolutely certain that that won’t stop Bexley tying for top place
(worst) in London when setting Council Tax for next year.

The actual rate will be announced at the next Cabinet Meeting on 20th February.

Councilor Craske then adopted his best showman persona to announce the plans he
had for his portfolio. It was a cross between a Petticoat Lane stall holder
selling his wares at knock down prices and a Chancellor with
pre-election money to give away, money previously stolen from a gullible public.

He said he was going to make the borough cleaner (didn’t he slash the street
cleaning budget a couple of years ago?), greener (who was it who stopped all
tree planting?) and safer (he stopped routine monitoring of the CCTV).

To address the safety issues he was going to spend an extra £135,000 on
community safety. After a shaky start on Food Safety Bexley has got back on
course and the Food Safety Team is going to get another £48,000 for an extra
member of staff.

The Garden Waste Service has been a success and over 50% of residents now find
themself forced to cough up the Bin Tax. The team running it will get an extra
£26,000. (One part time post.)

The borough’s 18 car parks are cleaned twice a week at a cost of £40,000 a year
but the multi-storeys are almost inevitably filthy by design. They will be taken
out of the £40,000 budget, given a deep clean and redecorated. Another £83,000
this year and £43,000 thereafter.

The grass cutting budget which was slashed barely a year ago is to be raised by
£50,000 Craske teasingly said, but no, make that £90,000.

The tree budget of £40,000 scrapped soon after the Tories came to power is to be reinstated. He
couldn’t equal that Councillor Craske said, and reaching for a pair of fluffy ears deep
inside his top hat, announced it would be raised to £70,000 by 2018/19. “It will
transform our borough. it will be far greener and healthier” he said apparently
unaware of the several sites of scientific interest which are
succumbing to the bulldozers.

The
four main town centres are swept daily and this will be improved following
the acquisition of a new street cleaning vehicle capable of deep cleaning. It
will be able to thoroughly clean the main shopping centres “every single week” and
the lesser ones at least once a month. He is looking for a name for it. Any ideas?

£243,000 has been allocated to the cleaning of residential streets.

He was “proud of these proposals” and in a characteristic wind up of the
opposition members said he “couldn’t imagine any one of them being against
these proposals".

And where do you think that money has suddenly come from? Well I think it was
Cabinet Member Philip Read who gave the game away when he made a distinction (I will check the
recording later) between compulsory taxes and voluntary taxes.

The latter will be a none too subtle reference to the additional stealth taxes
imposed on residents in recent months. The few figures available at this early stage suggest
that the litter wardens and the Welling Yellow Money Boxes are raising enough to
cover all of Peter Craske’s prestidigitation.

He has pulled a cunning stunt which part of me admires in the same way that I sort of admire the criminal minds
who got him off the blogging rap. But I think
I would admire him more if he had pulled the stunt a few years ago and spent the
money on vital services such as SEN children or making sure youths don’t riot in
Northumberland Heath. But you don’t notice these things every day of the week,
more trees and footpaths free of chewing gum may well be a vote winner and that is what it is all about.

Parts of Sidcup have been at a standstill thanks to Bexley Council’s regeneration works
and Thames Water, Abbey Wood has been at a standstill from the station approach
all the way back to the roundabout at Oakhampton Crescent due to the Wilton Road
regeneration works and British Gas and for good measure the traffic chaos around
Albion Road in Bexleyheath has become even worse without the help of any
utility company. All that is needed is Bexley Council and their contractor F.M. Conway.

Perhaps I should explain how the gas works in Abbey Road can be responsible for traffic queues a whole mile away. To avoid
the three way traffic lights at the foot of Knee Hill (see Photo), northbound traffic is turning fight into Woolwich Road at the
top of the hill and as anyone who has used that junction will tell you, only two
or three vehicles at the most can turn right before the lights change and while
waiting no one can go straight on. Hence the secondary peak hour queue back almost to Long Lane.

I thought Councillors, Council employees and subcontractors were all forbidden
to read your blog! (†) Well someone obviously has because the Having a Larf signs
about NOT OVERTAKING non-existent CYCLISTS in Albion
Road seem to have disappeared. Could be a coincidence of course but I do not much
believe in coincidences just happening without some human intervention.

Bexley Council or their contractors. have come up with an even better wheeze
today - dig a trench half across Townley Road just below the Albion Road
roundabout, then place barriers and cones all around and set up temporary traffic lights on
all approaches to the roundabout. Result from about 7 a.m. onwards; massive queues
approaching the roundabout from all directions viz. Albion Road East,
Albion Road West and Townley Road.

I had to stand in the road to hold up the traffic queue to create a gap so that my daughter
could get her car out of the driveway and then venture further across to check for traffic coming the
other way since her line of sight was completely blocked by the queue.

If this is going on for months perhaps I should invest in a Hi-vis jacket and a STOP
sign on a pole like the school crossing people use.

Have sympathy for the 269 and B13 bus drivers as they have had to crawl
all the way up Townley Road to reach the Library bus stop then circumnavigate the Premier Inn and rejoin yet another queue in Albion Road.

At
this evening’s Cabinet meeting, Finance Director Alison Griffin said that things
were on course for a 3·99% Council Tax increase this year (subject to Full Council agreement of course)
which is the most that the Council can get away with without calling a referendum, and there is no way
Bexley Council will ever do that.

Putting up taxes by the highest amount possible does not sound good but at a
time when central Government is being less than helpful, to do so without eating
into reserves is a considerable achievement. It remains to be seen if Mayor Sadiq Khan
can maintain Boris Johnson’s record of annual reductions in the GLA precept.

It was however the next speaker who produced the real rabbits from the hat, and
he clearly relished doing so over and over again. Both opposition parties were
struck dumb, not a single question.

After the massive spending cuts of recent years, Councillor Peter Craske plans
a cleaner greener and safer borough. He had summoned up some £800,000 to spend
on projects which will be widely welcomed. If the money is spent effectively,
Bexley might not become a dirty tip after all.

Peter Craske really did sound rather impressive at a time when austerity is supposed to be
the norm. There must be an election due again before long.

Last Wednesday’s Transport Users’ Sub-Committee meeting was faced with a
scheduling problem. The representatives of TfL Buses, Network Rail and the police
South East Traffic Unit all failed to turn up and Southeastern Trains had sent a substitute.

The
first Agenda item was a presentation by pupils and staff of Beths Grammar
School in Bexley. An idiotically narrow pavement at their nearest bus stop, no pedestrian
crossing and school buses which arrive full because they start their journey in Wilmington,
combine to give them a serious road safety problem.

This they have tackled themselves and their ideas were presented to the Committee via a slide
show. As no paper copies were provided it is not practical to go into a lot of detail here but
Councillors said they were impressed and offered help in getting the scheme more widely adopted.

After 30 minutes the Committee moved on to School Crossing Patrols. This subject was
also given the slide show treatment and the gist of it was that there are fewer
school crossing patrols now than ten years ago - some have been replaced by
permanent crossings - and vacancies are sometimes prolonged because criminal
records checks can take six months or more to complete. There is no budget
available for any increase in the current level of patrols.

It is perhaps worth repeating that it is a legal requirement that drivers obey
the instructions given by school crossing patrols.

After another 30 minutes (eight thirty on the clock) the Chairman, Councillor Val Clark said
she was going to invite the substitute Southeastern man to present his report (Agenda item
9) because “he has to get away by nine”. The police (Agenda Item 8) objected
because they said they had to get away by nine too, so the Agenda sequence was
allowed to progress unaltered.

Usually a couple of officers from Bexley police deliver a report on behalf of
their Safer Transport Team. This time they came from Greenwich because the two
boroughs have combined Transport Safety forces with most of their staff based in Warspite
Road, SE18. They argued that this improved the situation in Bexley because a
larger number of officers was available should any trouble arise.

The school pupil problem in Broadway persists and barriers are being considered
to regulate bus queuing and local police officers also patrol there because of the “issues”.

There was also a continuing problem with cyclists messing around in front of buses, wheelies
and the like. A lot of CCTV recordings had to be trawled through to obtain clues about the
perpetrators but generally only their backs were seen.

A spate of bus vandalism in Bexley last November came to an end when a
window smasher was arrested.

A mobile phone action week had netted 6,045 traffic offenders of which 4,878
involved mobile phones. The old fixed penalty system has been abandoned in
favour of reporting to the Criminal Justice Unit which will decide on
prosecution or a training course.

The police officer twice said that the number of racial incidents had increased
since last June which contradicts what the now departed Bexley Borough commander
reported to the People Scrutiny Committee. Some incidents had been reported in
Broadway but maybe there had been a big increase in Greenwich that caused a
perceived spike. The incidents were of a minor verbal nature and not violent and
over a whole month could still be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The Southeastern man didn’t get a look in until ten to nine. His brief report
Included the facts that the lack of Boxing Day trains had been widely criticised,
that their December performance (84·6% on time against a target of 85%) was
better than November's. Recruitment of another 100 train drivers should further
improve performance. On board wi-fi will make an
appearance this year and completed during 2018
and will help better inform passengers.

Transport meetings tend to be dominated by Councillors Stefano Borella and John
Davey who seem to be the only ones there with more than a superficial
understanding of the subject, Councillor Davey had noticed that trains had not
been stopping at every station on the Bexleyheath line. It is an unpopular practice
but makes it look as though trains are running on time. He said it was “a fiddle”.

The SER man admitted that their Autumn timetable extended running times but that
contrary to popular opinion the practice of skipping stations to make up time
did not benefit their statistics because it was recorded as a cancellation. He also maintained that without 'skip stop', delays would
accumulate to unacceptable levels by the time of the evening rush hour resulting in chaos.

Every train user must have noticed that there is an infuriating two to five
seconds delay between a train coming to a standstill and the door opening
buttons becoming active. Councillor Stefano Borella certainly had and asked what
it was all about. The Southeastern rep. didn’t know anything about it. It was
all news to him. Councillor Borella said he had encountered cases of ‘skip stop’
resulting in trains not terminating at the advertised station. Mr. SER accepted
that that could happen.

Councillor Borella also referred to the two parallel and adjacent footbridges at Belvedere station where it
had been reported that one was in a bad state of repair and the other wasn’t.
However the SER man had been to have a look with Councillor Daniel Francis (Labour. Belvedere) and was able to tell Stefano that it
was Bexley Council’s bridge that needed resurfacing while Network Rail’s was not perfect but acceptable.

With no one from TfL present we learned even less about buses.
The proposals for rearranging routes in the North to accommodate
Crossrail should become public quite soon and the Council's contribution to the
cost of the Freedom Passes will reduce in the coming year. Usage has declined by
2·3% in the past twelve months. I think I can claim some of the credit for that.

I used to pride myself on going everywhere within the borough by bus but it
takes up far too much time. For example, fewer than 15 minutes to Bexley by car and around an hour by bus. I
simply cannot afford to waste 90 minutes on such a trip. The new hop on, hop
off within an hour fare has also had an impact on the Freedom Pass cost reduction.

Another snippet of information was that the bus arrival indicators in Broadway are to be
reintroduced imminently. Why were they ever removed?

On road safety it was reported that the percentage increases in accidents was
steep but this was from extremely low figures, such as zero fatalities up to
one. In two recent road accidents the fatalities were the result of the driver
dying from natural causes.

The new London Mayor had not made clear his views on cycling in the borough so
the plan to tarmac the gravel sections of the Thames path had not progressed.

Councillor Borella said the plan to install many bicycle stands around the
borough appeared to have stalled. A Council officer agreed that it had due to
personnel changes in the office but the programme is underway again.

There had been many complaints about the traffic delays which occurred daily
following the works carried out in North End Road. It was hoped they would reduce
when the traffic lights from Thames Road to the Fish Roundabout were
coordinated via a planned interconnection cable.

Cabinet Member Alex Sawyer made an interesting remark. He said he was looking
for more sites where drivers might be offending against the rules of the road. Not that he is
“looking for more junctions where safety might be improved” but places where there
are “large numbers of failures to observe road signs”. It was pretty close to
saying he was looking for junctions that would generate the most revenue.

Note: The next camera site was mentioned but I didn’t hear
it at the time, neither did my recorder pick it up, but I think it was an
allegedly unobserved No entry sign.

A correspondent notes that blog material has been in short supply
recently and suggests it will be allowing time for me to do other things. There is a lot
of truth in that but the emphasis should be reversed. I am giving priority to the other things
which have been taking far too much time and there has been none left over for digging into what
might be going unreported.

It’s amazing how many people think that retirement means loads of free time
spent sitting around doing nothing. Obviously I am not good at refusals because I find
myself an unpaid hospital visitor, carer, taxi driver, commercial photographer,
personal shopper and IT consultant. I have unanswered email going back to New
Year and the TV has only been on once in 2017. Maybe I am just a poor organiser.

Helpfully
the aforesaid correspondent has written a short blog for me and even
supplied the title used above. He is not at all pleased about what Bexley
Council is doing in Albion Road. (It’s a pity he doesn’t own a camera.)

A trip to Albion Road was on the agenda for this week as
Bexley Council had
announced that they would start to destroy it this week, but at Wednesday’s
Transport Users’ Committee meeting they said the start had been deferred to next week,
so I was glad of the excuse not to go there.

The following report suggests the Committee does not know what it is talking about.

Some expensive work has just commenced in Albion Road, Bexleyheath
which is funded by Transport for London. It will result in the previous two traffic lanes
in each direction being reduced to one lane each way but creating TWO cycle
lanes for the virtually non–existent cyclists.

As a
local resident I cannot recall the last time I actually saw anyone cycling along Albion Road.

I would guess this proposal must have been initially approved in Boris Johnson’s
time and that
it was probably a precondition to obtain TFL funding that any scheme must
include cycle lanes even if no cyclists use the route.

Bexley Council Highways Department has been asked several times if any surveys of actual cycle usage along
Albion Road have ever been undertaken but surprise surprise the question
has been ignored. I wonder what a Freedom of Information request might reveal?

The first phase of the work is taking place between the roundabout at the Oaklands Road car park entrance
and the Townley Road roundabout. The central wall between the carriageways is to
be removed and to facilitate this work the traffic lane either side of the
central barrier has been coned off. For the remaining lanes which can still be
used Bexley Council have put up signs warning motorists of NARROW LANES but then
adding the instruction DO NOT OVERTAKE(non-existent) CYCLISTS.

As the heading says someone really is ‘Having a Larf’!!!!

At
the Transport Users’ meeting, the engineer in charge of this madcap scheme said that the later
stages of construction will cause “significant disruption”. I suspect that the
roundabouts proposed for Gravel Hill at both the Watling Street and Albion Road
junctions might improve traffic flow although if they are as silly as those
installed elsewhere in the borough, maybe not.

Andrew Bashford is the man who told me back in 2009 that his road designs
complied with the recommendations of the Transport Research Laboratory unaware
that my son was their safety consultant at the time. I wish that all of Bexley
Council’s lies were so easy to disprove.

No blog tomorrow. Granddaughter is seven already, party to go to. How did
that happens so quickly? She wants a science book. Enid Blyton is for kids!

Despite there never being any sign of activity in Wilton Road each time I make a visit, and I
have only missed Sunday so far, someone must occasionally do a bit of work there.
New block paving is beginning to appear.

What the traders in the area would like to see is a few shoppers. The almost
total lack of parking spaces, the additional road works in Abbey Road and Harrow
Manor Way, not to mention the defective traffic lights which have gone unfixed for two months, has not unnaturally driven them all away.
The larger versions of the ohotographs are dated.

I think I am just about in favour of Bexley’s switch over to LED street
lighting. My initial reaction was that it is dim and it’s a fact that my back
garden is no longer lit up by the spill from sodium lamps but the LEDs probably
provide a more pleasant light, certainly my camera prefers it. If it is cheaper
to run, I am marginally in favour.

However it would appear that not everyone is a bit of a fence sitter like me,
many people do not like it at all. A story from the inside which may or may not
be true is that the main reason for the new and inconvenient rule that
prohibits written or
telephone complaints about street lighting policy was hastily pushed in because
the number of complaints was getting out of hand. The truth would be hard to
come by but some things can be uncovered reasonably easily.

Under
the old system street lighting was a Highways responsibility - as you might guess would be logical - with
Keir plc being the maintenance contractor.

According to the disgruntled of Watling Street this was a take over by Bexley’s
Deputy Director of Services and Programmes, Graham Ward under the nose of his
Highways colleagues.

Well done FM Conway you might say for stealing a march on Keir but a bit of
digging, not to mention prompting by the aforesaid disgruntled, suggests that
this might be a not entirely wholesome takeover.

The
Lighting Director at FM Conway is a Mr. Graham Cartledge who had lighting
experience at the eponymous Cartledge Street Lighting company, but that outfit became part of the Kier Group.

Within Watling Street the switch of maintenance contractor from Kier
to Conway is said “to stink worse than Crossness on a bad day” and you have to
agree that the coincidences do provoke suspicions that something untoward may have been going on.

My informant speaks of brown envelopes but that is easy to say; how would anyone get hard evidence of that?

With Thames Water about to start redevelopment of the Bexley side of the
Ridgeway this year, the long overlooked route between the Thames and Plumstead
station should be more open to walkers and cyclists.

The
Ridgeway Users Group is very keen to make the Ridgeway welcoming to walkers and
cyclists and will be holding a meeting for users and potential users on Saturday
28th January at 12 p.m. in the Dial Arch pub, Woolwich. The Dial Arch is in
the new Arsenal development, close to the Crossrail station.

There you can hear what’s happening on the Ridgeway and a talk about the Group’s plans for 2017.

The biggest influence on
Council Tax levels in Bexley probably comes from the Council’s Finance Director Alison Griffin.
She has set out her view on what lies ahead in some obscure Local Government publication.

I don’t think reading it told me anything I didn’t know already so I would doubt
the intended readership learned anything either. Maybe you can work out why she felt
obliged to write such a piece. I hope she did so in her own time not ours.
Click image for source document.

According to
Sadiq Khan’s Twitter feed
he met the Leader of Bexley Council yesterday. Teresa O’Neill felt it necessary to wear her Council name
badge whilst Sadiq assumed everyone would know who he was.

These two from opposite ends of the political spectrum have more in common than
you might imagine. As soon as she was elected in 2006 O’Neill worked to ensure
Bexley remained an isolated outpost of the metropolis and met with a notable
success when it was announced two years later that there would be no local
bridge across the Thames. Meanwhile residents who responded to a consultation
thought she was misguided.

Khan has gone down a very similar route. Elected only seven months ago he has already decided that he
doesn’t want to see a river crossing in Bexley either. Which of them should be despised the most? In
terms of broken election promises it must be Khan by a mile.

Hasn’t anybody got any news from further South? Isn’t
Sidcup being dug up again?Wilton Road wasn't quite as disrupted yesterday
as it was on Tuesday, there were
fewer construction vehicles parked on the eastern side of the road. The photo
was taken just after one o’clock when three men were on site. A local resident
reported that they didn’t show up until after ten and before three they packed up and left.

I thought that Greenwich Council planned to employ apprentices on the Wilton Road
job. None of the men seen so far look like apprentices.

Later today I shall be picking up someone from the station who is temporarily
unable to walk far. Parking should be fun. That’s assuming I can get there, my
own road has been close to blocked at times with commuters and others who cannot
get any closer to the station. That’s in part due to the Abbey Road gas works. Removing an
old main so the man said. Surely there must be more to it than that or they
would simply leave it there?

I
met Mick Barnbrook yesterday and he asked if I had read his various Tweets. I
follow his @Sleazebuster account but said I had seen very few and finished
up telling him about the full stop trick which will give him a wider distribution.

It seems to have worked, this is one of his first efforts. It’s not four years
actually, it is one thousand, six hundred and eighty one days but he reckoned
most people would not realise that was longer.

As each month goes by, the police (DPS) write to me to say they have discovered
something else hidden in Bexleyheath police station and looking into it will
cause a further delay. It’s a good ruse. I wonder how long they can keep it up for?

The Visitor Centre once
expected to open in the summer of 2015 appears to be
ready for use and the grounds around it are now freely accessible but I have yet
to catch it open for business, neither has there been an official opening.
Perhaps there won’t be one bearing in mind it is only a two minute walk from my home
and the mayor is camera shy.

The mosaique inset into the ground where five paths cross has appeared since
Lesnes Abbey was last mentioned here is something else that looks very nice.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the pond viewing platform.

From 18 months late we go to just two - or is it a mistake?

All of us driven mad by the disruption to everyday life caused by Crossrail construction
have long been looking forward to October 2017 when Network Rail has always said
that the new station would open for Southheastern trains and they would up
sticks and go away.

Not any more according to the latest version of their website. “The new station
will open in December 2017” and “from December 2018 Elizabeth line trains will run”.

It wouldn’t be the first mistaken Crossrail announcement. Let’s hope it is another.

Local news reporting has changed a lot over the past year. It used to be a
priority for me to log on to the News Shopper website on a Wednesday morning but since
their move to Sutton it has not usually been worth the effort. I am not very
interested in a Bexley edition front page which carries news from Dartford,
Greenwich, Greenhithe, a crime that took place in Newham or a choir from Lewisham.
You have to go back to mid-November before you find the front page of the local
newspaper carrying a Bexley story. Sacrilege I know but sometimes my copy has
gone into the bin within a minute of getting hold of a copy.

BiB has been struggling too since the new Chief Executive decided that her
highest priority job was for the Council to blank Bonkers whenever it could.

She took away the Press Desk, put up barriers in the Council chamber, asked Councillors not
to speak to me and, so a Councillor told me, threatened employees who extended a friendly hand.

They don’t have many meetings either. They cancelled the last Council meeting of
any note on 13th December and there won’t be another until 23rd January. The last
time you read a Council meeting report on Bonkers
was 10th December so we will have
gone more than six weeks with nothing much going on in public.

I was thinking that I might have to get into reporting the odd bit of
non-Council related news on these pages when a story dropped straight into my lap.

On my way into Abbey Wood station at 12:30 for today’s
Crossrail photo mission the
police car and Network Rail’s Response Unit outside grabbed my attention.

On the platform I caught the tail end of some sort of emergency meeting and I
asked what was going on. The story varied slightly between the naturally
cautious Network Rail and Balfour Beatty staff and those who claimed to have witnessed the event.

What isn’t in dispute is that someone broke into the Crossrail site just after midday from Abbey
Terrace (see Photo 3) and either climbed the fence or slipped past the guard, scrambled on to the platform
and then jumped down in front of a Dartford bound train.

According to the witness he stood there waving his arms while the approaching
train driver sounded his horn and presumably slammed on the brakes.

If it was a suicide attempt, the man lost his nerve but if it was an idiot
scaring the life out of railway staff, he held it to the last few seconds because he
then jumped into the Crossrail works site and scarpered into Mottisfont Road.

I was told that at least one of the railway company’s staff was shaking with the shock of
seeing it. I am not surprised.

As I left the station I could see half a dozen officials in the office watching
the CCTV footage.

The long awaited regeneration of Wilton Road, the shopping area that forms
the approach to Abbey Wood Station, has started.

The shops to the north of the railway went to the wall when Network Rail closed
the station access route which passed them by and now Greenwich Council, aided and abetted by Bexley
Council, appears to have a similar aim in mind by its inconsiderate and thoughtless public works programme.
Yesterday contractors to Greenwich Council set about ripping up Wilton Road’s west side pavement and erecting
barriers, then promptly disappeared, probably because it started to rain.

Photographed in the rain around 3 p.m. 9th January

Today they were back in force to create a lot more misery by taking over the
Bexley side with diggers, lorries and Portaloos. The road is
close to being blocked. (Photo 3 below.) There is no parking on the Greenwich side
and apart from the two Disabled Bays there is almost nowhere to stop on the Bexley side either. When I passed
the two disabled spaces were occupied by a car which managed to straddle both bays. A case of a disabled brain presumably.

Wilton Road photographed around 12:30 p.m. 10th
January

This is not what Greenwich Council promised in their letter to traders. A section of the parking area is not the whole blooming lot!
The parking problem is so severe that the Abbey Arms has had to put a barrier on
its customer car park. (Photo 4 of Row 1.) More expense for another hard pressed business. Council
officials have no idea of the problems they cause and probably care less.

Bexley Council has joined the quest for chaos by licensing a hole in the road at
the entrance to Wilton Road. Contractors to British Gas dug a hole in the ground
a week ago and promptly went away leaving the area to the mercy of three way traffic lights.

The queues can be long but the real problem occurs during the
rush hour. The one way loop from Abbey Road, via Wilton Road, Gayton Road,
Florence Road and back to Abbey Road causes gridlock. No one can get out of
Florence Road because of the queue in Abbey Road and that queue cannot move
because no one can get into Wilton Road because of the circular queue. Far too
complicated a situation for any Council traffic manager to understand, let alone
find a solution.

Transport
for London has got in on the act too. Since the 244 bus stand was displaced two
years ago from Gayton Road the new stand on Knee Hill has proved inadequate at times.

Why the timetable calls for two buses to frequently sit there, and occasionally three, I
have no idea but evidently TfL has recognised the problem. Last week they created a
new bus stand in Florence Road complete with bus stop and yellow paint on the road.

Another four parking spaces lost.

Bexley Council has been told umpteen times
that Wilton Road businesses are crippled by its parking restrictions. Something like 20
spaces have been taken away within the past two years and that does not include
those lost to the regeneration. No one at Bexley has taken the slightest
interest in the problems they create and simply go on creating bigger ones.

Just
a couple of minutes walk away, Bexley Council has taken yet more parking spaces
out of use in both Fossington and Abbey Roads. No idea why but it all adds to the chaos.

Another minute further east my own road is being regularly clogged by commuters. They park all around
blind corners. I met someone on the wrong side of the road on a corner only
yesterday. Sooner or later it will cause an accident.

If you think things couldn’t get worse for Wilton Road, you’d be wrong.
The Post
Office announced today that it plans to close their SE2 Crown Office at the entrance to Wilton Road.

By the way, TfL has said that
the pedestrian controlled lights outside
Sainsbury's which have been going off by themselves every 90 seconds or so is
not a serious enough problem to be worth a priority fix. They have been broken
for at least six weeks bringing yet more traffic chaos to the area. It wouldn't be
allowed in the south of the borough, but the north seems not to matter.

On a day that the rail unions are attempting to bring the capital to a halt railway
services can only get better. Probably.

One of my railway enthusiast correspondents who keeps his eye on the
thousands
of Crossrail photos indexed on Bonkers provides me with
occasional insights into more general railway developments. A very recent one led me to a
document buried deeply in TfL’s website which I had missed and a section of it may be of
wider interest to readers.

The diagram below is largely self-explanatory. It shows that Abbey Wood is due
to get four trains an hour to Paddington and four to Heathrow via Paddington all
day long. During peak hours there will be a further two to West Drayton and
another two to Paddington making up the promised twelve trains an hour.
Occasional trains will go to Maidenhead and Reading.

I have always maintained that the route to Abbey Wood is the main line and the
one to Shenfield is a branch. That view is partially confirmed by Shenfield
apparently not gettinhg a Heathrow service.

Fly-tipping
People don’t like fly tipping do they?
Yesterday’s blog got a few people
agitated. The craziest story I heard came from the St. Augustine’s Road area of
Belvedere where there was one of those big street bins which didn’t get emptied
often enough and consequently tended to have black sacks placed alongside it.
If you have made a special journey to the bin, where else would you put them?

However they are undeniably unsightly especially if the foxes get at them so the
occasional request was made to the Council to pick them up. Bexley Council has
come up with a unique solution to the problem of bins attracting sacks but it is not the obvious one of
emptying the bins more often. Council logic is that if a full bin attracts black
sacks then the problem would go away if the bin was removed, so that is what
they have done. Presumably the black sacks will be more widely distributed in future.

Gayton Road in Abbey Wood and nearby Lensbury Way lost a total of at least eight street
bins about a year ago. In the case of Gayton Road where the bins were, a spy
camera has been installed to make sure no one drops a black bag there. Fly
tippers are the primary cause of fly tipping, not the Council, as Cabinet Member
Peter Craske is fond of telling his Labour party colleagues, but Bexley Council
is a fly tipper’s primary motivator.

Crossrail
It’s four weeks since Crossrail was last mentioned here and pictorially speaking
it has not been the most exciting month on record. They took ten days off over
Christmas and New Year but outside that period the work was mainly
prepare the ground, lay the cable conduits, fill the holes with concrete and
drop the pre-cast platform sections into place. They will have to be going some
to finish it by February when the track is due to be laid but things somehow
seem to run to time. Click
here for pictures.

There was some station roof work going on too but without a drone it is hard to see what.

If you turn a blind eye to a problem it will go away appears to be the philosophy of Bexley Council.

It's
three months since I spoke to Bexley’s Head of Recycling about the constant
fly-tipping close to my home - though thankfully out of sight - and he said all
the right things. I sent him
some photos by email and the
video he requested was delivered to him later that very same day, 11th October.

And what did Mr. Steve Didsbury do about it? Absolutely nothing as far as I can
tell. He seemed to be quite enthusiastic about getting clear photos of the
culprit and his vehicle complete with registration number but never got back to me.

The dumper was one of two who make regular visits to the same spot to dump their
rubbish. The huge heap shown below was dumped a week ago and photographed today.

Bexley Council denies there is a worsening fly-tipping problem and Steve Didsbury
twiddles his thumbs while ignoring it.

I told him about someone who is blatantly abusing the waste service with two
green bins and he said he would get someone on to it straight away. Did he hell!
Didsbury knows all about waste, especially about being a primary waste of space.

The black lump on the right is a fridge! On the left is a bed and mattress.

If you think that keeping BiB going - somewhat intermittently over
recent weeks - is no way to spend one’s retirement then you may agree that beta testing facilities for
the small ISP that provides the
technology on which Bonkers runs is even sillier.
(The upside is that BiB does not cost me anything.)

I was asked to check out their new mail server before the end of January and I
planned to do it over Christmas when things were quiet but then realised I
would have no one to call on if things went pear shaped, so didn’t start work
on it until last Tuesday. The job involved moving about 200 email accounts
spread over 19 domains and updating two dozen internet connected devices to work
on an IMAP mail server instead of the old POP system.

The mistake I made was thinking I could maintain the old mail service while seamlessly migrating to the
new server. It was simply impossible with too many ‘chicken and egg’ situations
which made it a total non-starter. As some of you noticed, I eventually gave up and
everything was switched off from late afternoon yesterday to around lunchtime today.

The main bonkers mail addresses are probably working again now although not without
the odd glitch. A very few emails are not being collected from the server and
some are arriving in duplicate.

However that is not the real reason for retelling this tale of woe. Internet
connected devices are attacked constantly by robots and strong passwords are
needed. I don’t often look at their log files but during the update procedure I
did. A large number of the attempted break-ins were Bexley Council related. I
know that someone at Bexley has tried to bring down the servers before but some
of their guessed user name and passwords are a bit beyond the pale. The attempt to
break in using ‘Wouldyouliketo****teresaoneill’ must have been an act of
desperation but it is perhaps an indication of the depths to which some people will
stoop to bring down BiB.

They should remember that I can call up the Technical Director at my ISP any
time I like and ask for a trace. Last time I did that they found
the Peter Craske connection within a few hours, the police took something like five months.

Greenwich Council has sent a letter to all the residents and traders in Wilton
Road to say that the public realm work will start on Monday 9th January.

The work is scheduled to take eight weeks (weather permitting) during which time
sections of the footpath will be unusable and parking bays will be taken out of
use. Later on in the year the road will be resurfaced.

Not everything will be as promised. Only the part of the footpath owned by the
Council will be relaid, the sections which are in private hands on the Bexley
side will not be improved at all. It will likely look a total mess as a result.

I know the official reason for this situation but only because of my involvement
with the Traders’ Association so I am not at liberty to say what it is. However
you would be wrong to assume that it is a Bexley Council cock-up.

I don’t yet know whether the same applies on the Greenwich side of the road, but
if it is they have not said anything about it.

I’ve not been up Heron Hill recently but I think the site of
Ye Olde Leather Bottle remains a scar on the
landscape with as yet no sign of any redevelopment.

An
anonymous communication - so be careful not to take this as Gospel - suggested
that too many pub closures in Bexley link the same individuals both inside and
outside Bexley Council. The writer did not beat around the bush, he said that
the closure of Bexley pubs was being orchestrated from within Bexley Council and
a developer of Indian extraction with links to the local Tory party was involved
in a whole string of lucrative pub redevelopments.

Every time I went to Heron Hill with my camera in 2015 and 2016 I was abused - and once
manhandled in a fairly minor way - by the man shown in the turban. He seemed to
be very averse to any publicity.

I was able to establish some common links between a handful of local closed watering
holes but for all I know the only people interested in developing old pubs are
Tories. Not all coincidences are criminal and the promised written evidence that
they were was not forthcoming, as is too often the case.

However there were references to poor demolition practices and my recollection was
that Bexley Council was strangely reluctant to investigate in the case of the Leather Bottle. I have forgotten exactly why but I asked Mick Barnbrook if he
could make a Freedom of Information request on anything Bexley Council might
have relating to Health and Safety at the Heron Hill site.

Bexley Council was again very secretive but revealed that there was
correspondence between it and the Health and Safety Executive. They didn’t want to release
it, they never do, but maybe this time they have a valid excuse. This is what they said

It is considered that there is a strong public interest in working to ensure
the apprehension or prosecution of offenders. Consequently, the public interest
favours withholding information that could impair the administration of justice if it were made public.

So it would appear that it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that someone will
be prosecuted for demolishing a building while the public had pretty much
unrestricted access to it. Towards the end of the demolition the only thing
stopping me giving an unsupported wall a good shove was a bushy beard.

If there was a court case some uncomfortable facts might emerge which would most
likely embarrass Bexley Council. I can’t see Bexley being too keen on such a
course of action, especially if it links back to the prominent Tory to which the anonymous correspondence led.

According
to what the lady from Greenwich said at a Traders’ meeting last October, today was when
the regeneration of Wilton Road, Abbey Wood was due to start.

At lunchtime there was nothing to see but both Greenwich and Bexley Councils
have recently installed new LED equipped lamp posts.

On the Greenwich side the columns look rather nice hanging over the footpath
and are entirely in keeping with the village atmosphere they are trying to create.

Across the road in Bexley new columns more appropriate to the A2 than a village have been installed.
They tower over every nearby building and will illuminate living accommodation on both sides of the road.

Once again, Bexley Council appears to be entirely clueless when it comes to road and public realm design.

This entry is here to stop certain automatic functions on BiB generating an
error file when there are no 2017 entries.

BiB will resume when something interesting happens in Bexley apart from the
usual confusion about where one might safely park during the holiday period. In
line with Bexley’s need to extract ever more money from residents there were no
parking concessions this year beyond what was necessary to give staff a couple of days off.